Nate Taylor

The data you use in your unit test communicates messages you might not be meaning to communicate.  For the sake of this post, unit testing means any tests written to test a specific portion, or unit, of code. It does not mean Test Driven Development, whether you’re writing tests first or tests after, the data you ...

Myopic Software Development I know nothing about software development! I have developed software professionally for 17 years. And yet, I know nothing about software development. I have contributed to an application that was used literally across the world (and quite possibly on all 7 contents). And yet, I know nothing about software development. I have ...

This week I’ve been at Codemash in Sandusky, OH. It’s a conference I had heard of but never attended. In 2016, I decided I was going to start submitting to different conferences, ones slightly outside of my region, and Codemash fit that bill.  It has been a great experience. Last night, I talked to a ...

If you’ve checked out my Pluralsight Course on Semantic UI you’ll know that it goes through the basics of Semantic, but doesn’t look at customizations. Being able to customize Semantic is one of its strong suits, but time kept me from going into any details. This week someone that had watched my course reached out to ...

Thank you to my dad, who always had a computer at home. Who was always willing to let me explore and experiment. Who wasn’t afraid I’d ruin something. To John Osgood, who was a good friend that would help me build games. Even later, when you turned on me, you inadvertently solidified my inner strength. Because ...

For those that don’t know, I actually run two blogs. I have this one where I talk primarily about software development, and I have CouchJitsu where I talk about another hobby: Brazilian Jiu Jitsu.  I’ve been training BJJ for a little over 4 years now and I really enjoy it.  Not long after I started ...

Imposter syndrome has become a common topic among some of the people I follow on Twitter or talk to in person. There have been books and blog posts written about it. This weekend, at the DevUp conference, I saw a great talk on it by Heather Downing. If this is the first time you’ve heard ...

I’m a big proponent of Test Driven Development (TDD.) If you’ve read a few of my blogs or seen a couple of my conference talks, that’s likely not news to you. The benefits I get from TDD are more than just accurate code. In fact, when I talk to people about TDD, I’ve shifted the ...

I spent the past 3 days in Orlando at Elixir & Phoenix Conference 2016.  I first learned of Elixir a little bit more than a year ago. I read some docs but not much more than that.  I remember telling people at Dev Workshop Indy that they should keep their ears out for it, because it’s ...

This weekend I’ve been playing around with a Phoenix application. By default, it appears as if Phoenix uses Bootstrap, but I’m not a fan of Bootstrap, so I wanted to bring in Semantic UI. I ran into a problem, however, trying to configure my brunch-config.js file.  (Phoenix uses brunch by default. You can turn it off, ...